I have just replaced the "x" clamps on a friends board after previously repairing 2 others with 3"rlod".
I used this method-
Removed x clamps and heat sinks
Cleaned dice and sinks thoroughly with methanol and cotton buds
Put a spot of artic silver on the dice
Mounted heat sinks with m5 machine screws, nylon washers and washers
Let the board warm up till the 2 red lights came on and then let it cool
This method worked a treat on both others
The problem with this one is it plays a game for about 5-10 minutes then just freezes up. If i switch it off then back on it comes up with the 3 reds again. I can manage to get it to work again but the screen eventually freezes again and 3 reds. Any ideas what could be causing this or to solve this would be greatly appreciated Reply

i was going to paint my 360, but dont want to screw over my warranty, is there any way that you can take the outer shell apart and not leave any visible evidence(besides the color change) that you have taken the shell off and tooled around with it? Reply

"AMD is not in a position to move its product line to dual-core until it brings on an additional fab--either it's own Fab 36 or a foundry," Kevin Krewell, an analyst for In-Stat and editor of the Microprocessor Report, said Thursday. "Dual core equals two regular CPU dice, so it's not cost effective for AMD to ship dual-core [chips] for the same price as single-core. AMD needs to keep dollars per wafer growing, and aggressive pricing of dual-core would reduce it."

Looks like many people use to term dice. So for you guys bitching and moaning for Anand to chaneg it - guess what - No Dice!

Just google "cpu dies" - although you get some hits about dead processors, there are many more abot processor manufacturing, more than you get by googling "cpu dice" (the vast majority of those are to do with random number generation).

That makes little sense. You dice food but you don't call the resulting piece(s) "die" or "dice". However, a processor is made from a die (remember die-cast metal cars when you were a kid?), and if you have more than one of that type of die, you have dies. Even the Google search comparison between "dies" and "dice" confirms that to be true. Reply

pl. dies A device used for cutting out, forming, or stamping material, especially:
An engraved metal piece used for impressing a design onto a softer metal, as in coining money.
One of several component pieces that are fitted into a diestock to cut threads on screws or bolts.
A part on a machine that punches shaped holes in, cuts, or forms sheet metal, cardboard, or other stock.
A metal block containing small conical holes through which plastic, metal, or other ductile material is extruded or drawn.

pl. dies Architecture. The dado of a pedestal, especially when cube-shaped.

pl. diceA small cube marked on each side with from one to six dots, usually used in pairs in gambling and in various other games.
dice (used with a sing. verb) A game of chance using dice.

tr.v. died, die·ing, diesTo cut, form, or stamp with or as if with a die.
Reply

Considering they were corrected by someone else in a previous article about "dies/dice" and are still making the same mistake, it's important to make sure they fix it this time before it becomes a permanent fixture of this site.

And yes, that's really all I thought was worthy of mentioning. The review is pretty cool. Reply

I wouldn't be surprised if it simply slipped through marketing department editing, considering dictionary.com is saying it should be "dies". "Dice" is normally only ever for the six-sided tools of chance/gambling.

If they're creating a new use for the term, that in itself would be pretty noteworthy as well. Reply

1) If I buy the cheaper XBox360, how easy is it to add my own notebook hard disk later if I want it? Would have been very useful to know, and wasn't made clear.
2) Media playback compatibility info --I'm sure the unit can play DVD's, and probably MP3's, but can it play DivX content? Xvid? MPEG-4 or HD WMV? These would be good things to know. A video game console has moderate usefulness to me; a video game console with broad media playback capabilities far more so.

Finally, a comment to Microsoft: If the Xbox360 had Media Center compatibility (read: PVR), I'd have bought it in a heartbeat without having to think about it. It would be the perfect home theater convergence device. It's really too bad this wasn't an option. Reply

In response to your second point, the XBox360 does include support for Windows Media center. That is my main point of interest as well. The latest update rollup for windows media center 2005 (was released just over a month ago) adds support for the xbox360. Notice in the picture of the remote it also has the green button. Reply

quote:In response to your second point, the XBox360 does include support for Windows Media center. That is my main point of interest as well. The latest update rollup for windows media center 2005 (was released just over a month ago) adds support for the xbox360. Notice in the picture of the remote it also has the green button.

According to what I've read, that's support for a Windows Media Center PC attatched to it, not the ability to run Windows Media Center.. That's not really what I want. I want to be able to hook the thing up to a TV, insert a CD or DVD with DivX content on it, and just play back that way. Still not clear if I can do that. Reply

I went to my local Worst Buy and played call of duity 2. The graphics were cr*p with no anti-aliasing. If this is any indication of what to expect from this console then PC games and their players should have little to worry about. Reply

Seems as if a fan failure (or blockage of the inlet air passage) could potentially cause catastrophic failure of the critical silicon without effective thermal protection.

Anand, Kris, Tuan:-

Any idea of the nature and effectiveness of the thermal protection -- or wanna carry out a potentially destructive test by blocking up the inlet air on your presumably-rare Xbox360? An important issue for the TYPICAL technically-naive purchaser of the Xbox360, who is likely to be very careless about the Xbox360 ventilation and certainly will forget to regularly clear the inlet air-holes of sticky crud and junk. And what about the close-packed-finned heat-sink on the CPU? Such heat sinks on PC CPUs fill up completely with lint after about 6-9 months in a typical home environment. The Xbox360 is DELIBERATELY built to be non-user accessible for cleaning or any other purpose. A very big mistake. The internal air-duct should have been built on to a user-removable cover to expose the heat-sinks and fans for routine cleaning. I have had my share of cleaning out PCs that have become completely blocked up with crud, the first obvious symptom being erratic shut-down of the CPU by the motherboard thermal protection. The Xbox360 dissipates a lot of power in the core silicon --- much more than the old Xbox.

At present, I highly recommend taking a 2-year extended replacement warranty on the Xbox360, so that WHEN ( not IF) the heat-sinks fill up with junk (or the fans fail) and the box begins to function erratically, the owner can get a brand-new one :-) :-) :-) Reply

Anandtech's servers aren't handling this /. very well. But this is one of the first Xbox360 interal reviews (in a PC-hardware sort of fashion), so I'm sure every Xbox360 forum out there is posting links to it. Reply

If the developers worry about that much on not enough space to store sound samples, they should have invested on text to speech technology a long time ago, instead of relying on prerecorded sample. Unlike the cheesy Macintalk TTS in the 1980s, modern TTS can accurately simulate human speeches, even the emotional tones. Hey, Ananova uses it, does it not? That way the developers don't even have to worry about rehiring dead/retired/on-strike workers doing voices for games based on century-old movies! Reply

Voice synthesis is great but it's really not at the point of replacing voice actors for dramatic games. Can you imagine watching a movie with the voices of your favorite actor dubbed in by a computer? Not quite the same.

Also, it's more than just voice overs; a lot of space is used for graphics, models, textures, landscapes, animation data, sound effects, and music.

Most current games don't need more capacity than standard DVD at the moment but some definitely do and others could at least take advantage of it. Reply

quote:Unfortunately, we have yet to hear from Microsoft if this means that all games must be internally rendered at 1280 x 720 or if they can be rendered at a lower resolution and upscaled later on. There have been discussions involving at least one Xbox 360 game (Project Gotham Racing 3), rendering internally at a lower resolution and having the Xbox 360's TV encoder upscale it to 720p.

The reason for this can be found on Bizarre's Forums:

quote:For those wondering why this information would be true, here's the technical reason for why the game would probably be running at 1024x600 interally. On the Xbox 360, there is a thing called DRAM which serves as the framebuffer for the image. It has 10MB of DRAM, which means it can store a 10MB image, and the advantage is that it can render that image very fast (this is what gives the Xbox 360 it's "free" AA capability). Now the thing is, that 10MB can only store a full HD image (1280x720 and above) WITHOUT Anti-aliasing. So, they have a system where games can split a frame into seperate sections called tiles so that each tile would fit into that 10MB of DRAM. However, tiling is something that may have to be planned for early in the game's development, and the final Xbox 360 development kits (which were the only ones to include the DRAM) were only made availible a few months ago. In turn, Bizarre may not have had time to build tiling into the game, and therefor wouldn't have been able to enable anti-aliasing when it's running at HD. So instead, what they've likely done is lowered the resolution to 1024x600 and enabled 2xAA (which coincidentally fits into the 10MB DRAM buffer perfectly), which allows them to use anti-aliasing without adding tiling into the game.

This essentially means that all later games which are built from ground up to include tiling, will feature free AA and a native 720p resolution. PGR3 had to go this route, because of lack of time with the final devkit and time restraints in order to make launch. Reply

you aint gunna be using a torx driver to remove them. there is a difference, and the T7, T8 are what comfirm this. Torx have 5 points, these have 6, and are deffinately completely different from torx as they are much harder to strip out.

quote:Torx is the trademark for a type of screw head characterized by a 6-point star-shaped pattern (in the same way that flatheads, Phillips, Allen, and Robertson have flat, ×-shaped, hexagonal, and square tips, respectively). People unfamiliar with the trademark generally use the term star, as in "star screwdriver" or "star bits." The generic name is hexalobular internal driving feature and is standardised by the International Organization for Standardization as ISO 10664.

A hex head is usually referred to as an Allen bolt or the infamous Allen wrench.

And as I posted earlier, from dictionary.com, the definition of dice is as follows --> A small cube marked on each side with from one to six dots, usually used in pairs in gambling and in various other games.

"You can now lift up the motherboard out of the metal chassis."
Less awkward, "You can now lift the motherboard out of the metal chassis."

"Three star bit screw drivers in the following sizes: T6, T7 and T12"
Is a three star ranked a little lower than a four star? ;) At first glance, I thought this was certainly a secure method of attachment if a screw driver with a three pointed star tip was needed. Torx, torx, torx!

"After two corners have been lifted, the rest of the clamp springs loose and can easily be removed by hand."

As these are not the small cubes used for gaming, the plural should be dies. Reply

quote:There are 48 shader units in the Xbox 360 GPU, but given that we're dealing with a unified shader architecture, you can't compare that number directly to the 24 shader pipelines of the GeForce 7800 GTX for example. We roughly estimated the power of the Xbox 360 GPU to be similar to that of a 24-pipeline ATI R420 GPU.

Well if a 700MHz P3 with 64mb ram and a geforce 4 can run doom 3 then imagine what you can do with mid-range hardware today. There is a lot of processing power in that box, especially for the price. I mean yeah a high-end PC is more powerful, but that's the way it's always been. I'm not a console person, mostly because I like shooters and a mouse/keyboard is completely necessary. Did microsoft change their policy towards keyboards and mice? I would love to lay the smack down on my friends in halo, but gamepads suck! Also whatever happened to the console being able to play with a pc over the internet? Didn't dreamcast have something like that? Reply

Heh, they should say that if the computational power of each pipeline is inferior to the dedicated Pixel/Vertex Pipes used in the R520. They are more versatile in the fact that they can execute both pixel/vertex shaders, but in exchange for that versatility each pipe is made more simple, and there are more of them over conventional GPU's.

The article says the chip has the processing power of a 24-pipeline R420, but only about 1/3 of its memory bandwith. Although you do have to keep in mind the bandwith that does not get wasted on AA thanks to the daughter chip. Reply

Agreed. I was very surprised to see that DVI/HDMI was left out of the first production run. My HDTV has all its component video inputs used up already, so it would have been nice to plug the 360 into one of the spare HDMI ports. I hate using switchboxes, but that's what I'll have to do with the component inputs now. Reply

Two dies as in tooling dies, are not referred to as dice. Dies is the correct word. The same applies to computer mouses. The plural for computer mouse is not computer mice, but computer mouses. Mice is a group of more than one animal, not more than one tool. I have thousands of dies here at work, and have worked around millions of dies, never once has anyone even suggested the use of the word dice for them.

From dictionary.com -->
die2 pl. dies or dice (ds)

1. pl. dies - A device used for cutting out, forming, or stamping material, especially:
1. An engraved metal piece used for impressing a design onto a softer metal, as in coining money.
2. One of several component pieces that are fitted into a diestock to cut threads on screws or bolts.
3. A part on a machine that punches shaped holes in, cuts, or forms sheet metal, cardboard, or other stock. 4. A metal block containing small conical holes through which plastic, metal, or other ductile material is extruded or drawn.
2. pl. dies Architecture. The dado of a pedestal, especially when cube-shaped.
3. pl. dice
1. A small cube marked on each side with from one to six dots, usually used in pairs in gambling and in various other games.
2. dice (used with a sing. verb) A game of chance using dice.
tr.v. died, die·ing, dies

To cut, form, or stamp with or as if with a die.

I don't care if AT gets it right or not as long as I can understand what they mean, but if we are going to discuss it, let's make sure we are correct. Reply

Don't worry, be happy, bucko. Sorry for being so damn right cheery right now, I had my therapist appointment last night, lol, and I feel good. haha

Anyway, I pre-ordered a 360 for my godson at the local Gamestop, well the one I work at, on June 18th, and he will now be waiting for the second shipment! We are only getting 26! Only 26 "good ones" and two "core" units. Anyone know what exact part of the building process is holding up construction of the 360's.

Is it the video card, cpu, what? Is it the HDD and that is why they created the core unit? Anyone know? Anand? Reply

Update: Just in case anyone else browses here to use as a guide.I cracked open a Zephyr model yesterday using brand new torx key sets. The only required ones are T8 and T10. I posted a photo guide here: http://i.imgur.com/IQzr0k8.jpgReply

Just signed up to say this fixed my 360. Had the RROD with 3 lights one day and nothing worked at all although the power brick and its lights seemed fine.After tearing in I found all the thermal grease was not on the chips for the cooling but all around them all over the surrounding board, nice job (it was a refurb from Gamestop...) and it still had the original x-clamp so I'm not sure if the bad grease job was from Microsoft or Gamestop, either should have used less though...